future mapping

‘Memories of the future really is what you’re talking about. The idea that by briefly or temporarily putting yourself in the future and thinking about what it’s like there, and then coming back to the present, that that influences the decisions you make about your behaviour between now and the future, and how you can cope and change things in order

But you can’t optimize systems in a context that’s changing, especially if it’s changing in unpredictable ways. Removing inefficiencies when circumstances are as anticipated means that there isn’t much slack in the system to respond when the unanticipated happens. Optimization is intrinsically brittle , because it’s about closely matching the outpu

The problem (or at least one of the problems) is that the twin edicts to simultaneously optimize your team and life and to be flexible in light of an uncertain future are in opposition to each other. Optimization presumes a kind of certainty about the circumstances one is optimizing for, but that certainty is, more often than not, illusory.

Making systems resilient is fundamentally at odds with optimization, because optimizing a system means taking out any slack. A truly optimized, and thus efficient, system is only possible with near-perfect knowledge about the system, together with the ability to observe and implement a response. For a system to be reliable, on the other hand, there

Resilience requires a kind of elasticity, an ability to stretch and reach but then to return, to spring back into a former shape—or perhaps to shapeshift into something new if the circumstances require it. Resilience is stretchy where optimization is brittle; resilience invites change where optimization demands continuity. But whether we’re talking

SAM ALTMAN: Good ideas — actually, no, great ideas are fragile. Great ideas are easy to kill. An idea in its larval stage — all the best ideas when I first heard them sound bad. And all of us, myself included, are much more affected by what other people think of us and our ideas than we like to admit.

If you are just four people in your own door, an

The purpose is to scout the path and shift the discourse.

In practice, a startup nonprofit has several important distinctions from traditional nonprofits: 1) it begins with a large goal and works backwards to identify incremental steps to achieve that goal, 2) it has an iterative, experimental mindset, and 3) it is an internet first organization.

Incrementalism: The vision must be broken down into incremental steps. If you are building the ecosystem for charter cities, where do you start? Who are the first groups you need to build a coalition with, how to get early wins to demonstrate credibility to various stakeholders? How do you balance the decades long nature of city development with g